Larry Ellison: Extend your SaaS apps in our cloud

Oracle chairman and CTO Larry Ellison claims that the computing giant is the only cloud vendor on "planet Earth" that allows organisations to use its platform to extend their software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.

"Let me be clear, we are the only [vendor] that has a platform we develop on and if you want to develop or extend our SaaS applications, you use the same platform that we use," he told thousands of customers at this year's Oracle OpenWorld talkfest in San Francisco.

"So if you want to extend your applications, you have maybe a few levers, a few buttons you can push and you're done."

"Salesforce.com is a little bit different - they have a platform [Salesforce1], but it's kind of a proprietary platform, it has nothing to do with standards," he claimed.

"Our platform is based on the SQL standard, the Java standard and we develop on it and you develop on it. Salesforce develops on our platform," he gloated. "The funny thing is Salesforce is the best of the rest because at least they have a platform."

Ellison claimed every important cloud service on the planet - apart from Saas provider WorkDay - runs on an Oracle database.

"Salesforce run our Java database. SAP - I'm going to try to be nice, it's so hard. [SAP] HANA powers the cloud. Who's cloud? What are they talking about?" he asked.

"What allowed our people to build [the Oracle Cloud Platform] and I admit it, it took 8 years ... is that we built a lot of applications so that cloud platform allows you to be productive and build modern social, mobile, secure applications in a productive and efficient way," he said.

He said it had been hard to build a "standards-based" cloud platform with the Oracle capabilities. "It's a big job," he said.

Ellison said that 30 years ago, Oracle made a promise to its customers that today compels the company to deliver technology in all three layers of the cloud - SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS.

He said the company has made the Oracle database upward-compatible over the years, enabling its customers' organisations to move their databases and apps running on microcomputers to client/server platforms, and then to Internet architectures with thin-client and mobile devices without these organisations having to change code.

"And along comes the cloud and that's exactly what people expect us to do and what we have been doing for the last 30 years, which is to move databases and applications to the next-generation of technology without you having to change a single line of code," he said.

Meanwhile, Ellison said the upgrade lets administrators move any Oracle database to the cloud by "pushing a button."

"Not only does it move, but it's automatically modernised," he said. "You can move any Java application with the push of a button from on-premise to our WebLogic Java platform.

"You can move any database application you have to our infrastructure-as-a-service [platform]," he said.

Ellison said the cloud service is different from the schema-as-a-service initially offered a few years ago - which enabled administrators and developers to build database apps in the cloud.

"This is very different - it's providing the identical capability; you have on-premise in the cloud - you get your own OS and VM instance, you have root access, complete control. If you need more storage and compute, you get it," he said.

"Everything is available on-demand in the cloud ... the fascinating thing is you can move [services] back [on-premise]. We are the only cloud that gives you choice."

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